Let’s play a thought experiment. Imagine that you’re a major pharmaceutical company, a public company, with shareholders that you answer to, and market analysts looking over your shoulder to see whether this quarter’s earnings are up to projections. Imagine that you want to make a new drug. Let’s make it an antibiotic, because — as [...]
From the excellent and forward-thinking research team at Extending the Cure comes a dismaying report: over 7 years, a more than 3-fold increase in resistance in the Gram-negative bacterium Acinetobacter baumanii to its drug of last resort, imipenem.
Because MRSA is a Gram-positive, we don’t talk much here about the Gram-negatives — the two categories of [...]
I’m thrilled today to present another guest blogger: Dr. Brad Spellberg, associate professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and author of the new book Rising Plague: The Global Threat from Deadly Bacteria and Our Dwindling Arsenal to Fight Them (Prometheus Books). This new book is important reading for anyone [...]
We’ve talked before about the shrinking number of drugs available to treat MRSA and about the challenges of getting new drugs to market. Well, it’s not just a problem in the United States.
A new report from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) — that’s the CDC [...]
By chance — or is it because interest is really picking up? — a couple of worthwhile stories on MRSA have been published almost simultaneously:
For when the science gets wonky: Environmental Health Perspectives has an excellent lay-language explanation of how drug resistance emerges and spreads — with gorgeous graphics!
For when yet another drug doesn’t work: [...]
Via Forbes.com comes news that the Food and Drug Administration has turned back Targanta Therapeutics‘ application for its new antibiotic oritavancin, which was designed specifically to target drug-resistant staph, and has asked for additional trials. This is a follow-on to a decision by an FDA advisory panel last month that also expressed doubt about the [...]
The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) has published a new report that fills in the background on last week’s news below, and confirms: The landscape for new drugs against MRSA and other multi-drug resistant organisms is bleak. (The organisms, summarized in the acronym ESKAPE, are: E. faecium, MRSA, Klebsiella, Acinetobacter, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacter.)
The [...]
Via the very robust pharma blogosphere, reports that two much-anticipated new antibiotics will be remaining in the pipeline a while longer:
Fierce Biotech says that Pfizer has withdrawn its US and European applications for dalbavancin, a much-awaited new MRSA drug, and will conduct another Phase III trial.
Pharmalot reports (via Reuters) that the Food and Drug Administration [...]
There’s news this morning that Interpol has seized $6.65 million of counterfeit medicines in the culmination of a 5-month undercover investigation that stretched across Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The fakes included purported antiretrovirals for HIV, anti-TB drugs, antimalarials (especially artemisinin) — and, chillingly for our purposes here, fake antibiotics for pneumonia [...]
Well, this is bad news.
I hope we can all agree that antibiotic use creates antibiotic resistance. (Proof, if any were needed, that the universe has a captious sense of humor; but then it has had millennia to practice. OK, sorry for the anthropomorphizing.) The more pressure bacteria are placed under, the more resistant mutants emerge [...]
Incentives for making new antibiotics: What would it take?
Comments closedAnother resistant bug rising: Acinetobacter
0 CommentsGuest Q&A: Dr. Brad Spellberg and RISING PLAGUE
0 CommentsAntibiotics – the EU pipeline is empty too
0 CommentsMedia round-up: recommending MRSA stories
0 CommentsEven more bad news on new drugs
0 CommentsMore bad news on new drugs
0 CommentsBad news on the new-drugs front
0 CommentsContributing to resistance: fake drugs?
0 CommentsDespite stewardship efforts, antibiotic use increasing
1 Comment© 2013 Maryn McKenna. All Rights Reserved.
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